First of all, I'm new to nes devealopment but I have some experience in Atari 2600 assembly.What I would like to do is change a game from mapper 116 (somari) to mapper 004 (MMC3). I've been reading abut both mappers and things are starting to make sence to me. For those who don't know, mapper 116 is a combination of VRC2, MMC1 and MMC3. The board can switch from one to the other with $4100 as a control adress to do this. I'm used to patching mappers on Atari, but the mappers on nes seem a bit more complicated.

What I'm looking for here is some tips on how to go at it. What I really would love is an emulator that could interupt and debug when a bank-switch is about to happen. Right now I'm not even sure if I understand the mappers correctly.

Patching from 116 to 004 shouldn't be too hard I guess, since I have a feeling the game hardly ever uses the other 2 modes. And I don't think it uses RAM banks either (but I don't know how to check that)

The rom I'm looking at right now is 'AV Mei Shao Nv Zhan Shi'Any help would be great.

A word of warning: A few emulators optimizes performance depending on the ROM you feed it with, which makes ROM/Mapper-hacking a bit more difficult than it should be. It's a bit stupid to be honest(as I've mentioned in other threads).

Use FCEUX or Nintendulator's debuggers, and set a breakpoint on writes to $8000-$FFFF. (And, given m116's multicart register, $4100-$5FFF)

That's how I'm trying to get a grip of things right now. But the dev's did some protecting and do a lot of unneeded switching and looping. I'm having a hard time checking what is needed and what is not. I have to keep track of what mode is activated at what time, and if the write actualy did something vallid. Since I'm only a beginner at nes mapper hacking, I'm not always sure if what I think will happen did actualy happen. And if I run the game step by step through the emulator, it sometimes doesn't show the changes of the bankswitching right away.This method interupts even if the command was not valid. Interupting on a bank switch would make clear if it was a valid.

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Well, assuming it's running in MMC3 mode at all...

It's mostly MMC3 that is being used, if you change the mapper to 004 then the game works but with glitches.

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Set breakpoints for reads or writes on $6000-$7fff

Nice tip, didn't think about that one. Seems pretty obvious now.

oRBIT2002 wrote:

A word of warning: A few emulators optimizes performance depending on the ROM you feed it with, which makes ROM/Mapper-hacking a bit more difficult than it should be. It's a bit stupid to be honest(as I've mentioned in other threads).

Thanks for the warning, I already noticed that some emulators ignore the imap header of that rom since it often is set to mapper 004 instead of 116. I was already wondering if that might give me trouble in the future if I hack it to a real 004 mapper.

I now found out the anomalies had something to do with the C bit (256K CHR ROM base).Since I don't understand what they mean with this, could someone clarify it for me? In other words, what changes when the bit is set?

The normal CHR banking registers on the MMC3 and similar only have the ability to address 256 KiB of data (8 bit microprocessor, 1KiB banks → 256 KiB). The C bit there serves as a 9th bit shared by all the CHR banks, allowing a total of 512 KiB of CHR to be addressed.

It's kinda like how VRC2 splits each CHR bank across two memory locations; one of which controls the lower 4 bits (1 KiB out of 16 KiB), and the other controls the upper 4 bits (16 KiB out of 256 KiB), only here the bit is shared across all six (or eight) CHR banks.

Is the CHR-ROM of your target 512k in size? If not, the bit would be unused anyway.

The rom is 641kB in size, and the iNes header says it has 64 CHR banks. I don't know how to be sure of the size of the CHR rom. But I do know that the bit is set when calling the control register. and when I set it to 0 instead, the same glitches occur as if you would change the Mapper in the iNes header to 004.

Also the documentation in the wiki clearly states that only this game uses that bit, which would mean that this game is the only one that has such a large CHR rom.

The goal was a bit of a mix. First of all I wanted to dig in nes assembly. Then I wanted to make the rom compatible with MMC3 so it would run on an unmodded board and the everdrive (yep, 116 is still not supported). And then I want to make a repro.

Sadly I will have to drop some of my goals. I was thinking of adding the extra functionality to a MMC3 cart, but I have no idea how to go at it. I know I have t isolate the condition and use a flipflop of some kind to hold the state of bit c so it can be connected to the chr eprom's pin. But the exact logic is beyond my knowledge.Thanks for all the help guys, at least my insight of the subject has improved. Just sad that I have to cancel the project.

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